SONOMA, Calif. — Since being told of her cognitive impairment earlier this year, Paula Wolfert swears, she has simplified her cooking.

“I try to cook something every few days,” she says, “like practicing a musical instrument.”

The plan makes sense for the 75-year-old cookbook author, in the early stages of impairment.

Yet her definition of simplified doesn’t necessarily match that of others.

Her eight seminal cookbooks on the foods of the Mediterranean are known for challenging readers to become better cooks.

During her four-decade career, she often tested a few recipes a day.

Meals for herself and her husband of 30 years, crime novelist Bill Bayer, qualified as eclectic: duck confit and a Syrian dish spiked with Aleppo pepper, a spice she introduced to American chefs in 1994 with The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean.

As she cooks the scallops, something unusual happens: She turns to an open cookbook and reads from her own recipe.

“Bring to a boil and add cream,” she says, readying her measuring cups.

When about to pour, she turns back to the book: “Is it a third of a cup or a half? I forget everything as soon as I read it.”

Wolfert has turned into a cook like the rest of us. This new phase is giving her profound insight.

She looks up and says with a laugh: “Now that I have to follow my own recipes, some of them are so hard!”

For several years, Wolfert suspected that something was wrong. In its earliest stages, Alzheimer’s disease is surprisingly hard to detect. The telltale proteins that might cause degeneration can be confirmed only by a brain sample taken in an autopsy.

For a living patient, doctors look to other signs, including memory loss and other difficulties in functioning. Yet the illness can affect the brain for up to two decades before symptoms are noticed.

When Wolfert started forgetting words, she complained that she was losing her mind. Friends and her doctor insisted that she was fine.

Then, two years ago, during appearances to promote her most recent book, The Food of Morocco (2011), whenever someone asked her a multi-pronged question, “I couldn’t connect three sentences together,” she says.

Still, her doctor told her there was nothing wrong.

Finally, late last year, her husband suggested that they have omelets for lunch.

Wolfert drew a blank.

“I said to Bill, ‘Wait a minute; how do you make an omelet?’ ”

She saw two neurologists; each had a different opinion. One said she had early-stage Alzheimer’s disease; the other diagnosed mild cognitive impairment, a form of dementia that can progress to Alzheimer’s. Time will tell which she has, depending on how much she loses.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I know there’s something wrong. This isn’t the Paula that I used to know.”

Dementia is an unpredictable foe. There is no cure and no sure way to slow its progress. In 1983, New York University physician Barry Reisberg delineated seven stages to measure its progress. Wolfert has been told she seems to be at stage four: moderate cognitive decline.

Thankfully, her long-term memories remain crystal clear.

Wolfert knows that her condition has no cure. But once she was given a diagnosis, she looked to food to help — not just to keep her mind engaged, but also to see whether superfoods could buy her time.

“My feeling is: Accept that it is what it is, but stall it by trying to do as much as possible.”

She began taking donepezil, a drug used to treat dementia that might aid cognitive function. She scanned the Internet and started watching The Dr. Oz Show on television. Her condition became a surprising blessing: After a lifetime of charting cuisines, now she had a scientific frontier to explore.

A lifelong ingredient scout, she tapped into her network to find the best superfood sources. To maximize her omega-3s, she ordered 48 6-ounce packages of wild Alaskan king and sockeye salmon. She ordered sardines from Morocco.

Wolfert cut back on carbs and gluten after hearing that they might hasten the progression of the illness. She has a light snack in the afternoons, often gluten-free crackers spread with coconut oil. She usually skips dinner because she’s not hungry and for the supposed benefits of intermittent fasting. Lunch is light — usually seafood and vegetables — followed by an espresso and a square of dark chocolate, both of which might slow memory loss.

Is any of it working? The only evidence she can cite is that she looks and feels better than she has in years.